The material contains personal information that would allow British intelligence staff to be identified, inc some overseas, it adds #miranda

The Govt has had to assume Snowden data is now in the hands of foreign governments, since his travel abroad (to HK and Russia) #miranda

Statement specifically says UK but they haven’t finish decrypting yet

It is “impossible” for Glenn Greenwald or any other journalist to determine which info could damage UK national security: Robbins statement

“The claimant & his associates have demonstrated very poor judgment in their security arrangements with respect to the material…”#miranda“…

rendering the appropriation of the material, or at least access to it by other, non-State actors, a real possibility” #miranda

In other words, David Miranda was allegedly carrying top-secret British intelligence documents, including information that could identify British spies abroad, and Greenwald & Co. were so lax with their security — including Miranda’s traveling with a code that would allow someone to decrypt the documents he also carried — that the information could have been accessed by terrorists.

That’s not nothing. To put it mildly.

Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian vigorously disputes the government’s claims, as does Miranda’s lawyer.

Let’s put our heads back in the sand and believe everything secret government tells us, the same ones who’ve lied shamelessly to avoid accountability, as they make their wars to benefit the financial elites they serve – and which have caused the very blowback that they have to take our rights away to defend us from.

Beyond what Troy observes of the case, why should we believe anything that anyone in the US and UK governments say about foreign and surveillance policy? Both the Bush and Blair governments sexed up the intelligence in regards to alleged Iraqi WMD – that would be fabricating and lying – and have lied about every aspect of the surveillance statePanopticon Eye of Sauron until compelled by Snowden’s disclosures to concede (part of) the truth. If these pathologically mendacious spooks (or do I repeat myself? I do.) told me that the sky was blue, I’d immediately check to determine whether it was not, in fact, chartreuse. Interpreting these fabulists is like reading Pravda under the Soviet Union: read it, and assume the opposite of every important thing you read.

Besides, ‘national security’ is just an ideological mystification, an incantation intended to awe the masses while veiling the crass, corrupt machtpolitik and mammonpolitik of the elites. Iraq had nothing to do with the actual national security of the United States; neither did Afghanistan once Bush decided not to complete the assault on Tora Bora; and neither does the Eye of Sauron. What they do concern is the self-dealing of the elites (converting trillions of dollars of public wealth into billions of private wealth for contractors, lobbyists, and so forth), their desire (shared with all elites down through history) to entrench themselves in power, by creating mechanisms of domination, and the jouissance of power, that erotic feeling of power and mastery. If they were genuinely concerned with national security, they’d actually listen to the people who hate us, and cease prosecuting the policies that cause them to hate us.

It’s an absolute outrage to personal liberty and the autonomy of the individual that a free person can’t safely travel through an airport in possession of thousands of illegally obtained secret documents. It’s all just harassment by evil collectivist statists!

This reminds me of the comment about “ex-communists” testifying during the McCarthy era: “Their main claim to credibility is that they confess having belonged to a society of liars.”

I suspect Snowden is both a bit naive and a bit unhinged, and Greenwald’s only credential is that he is the lover of a journalist. Nevertheless, what set Snowden off was the blatantly illegal acts of a network of powerful and secret government agencies.

If you believe the British authorities were primarily concerned with the virtuous details on the above list, which is their umpteenth after-the-fact rationale, there’s a sale on ocean front property in Arizona you should check out.

Eh. The government has every reason to lie, and frequently does when it comes to national security matters. Even the UK. Frankly, without evidence verified by independent experts, I am not inclined to believe their version of events.

Additionally, none of the adversarial legal points the UK government alleging, are anything new or startling, or haven’t been made before by various governments and pundits, and reported right from the beginning in the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post among other media.

With 92 million documents classified each year, 58,000 is a vanishingly small number.

As for lax security, in order to even get this far, a passenger being protected by various levels of airport and travel security, had to feel the invasive might of the full force of the government.

What is the alternative for citizens who find themselves living under governments that, as former President Carter has said, are no longer functional democracies?

What remedy is there when secrecy is used to cover up wrongdoing and enable lawbreaking by government against its own citizens?

As a conservative, I tend to err on the side of stability. But I don’t think reflexive genuflection to assertions of authority, a temptation always for conservatives, serves us well in an era of mass surveillance and spying on populations – what used to be said to be the province of our former communist enemies.

Snowden and his associates have vacuumed up so much data (gigabytes and gigabytes) that they can’t possibly understand what it all is, what it could compromise, or who it could get killed. It serves no whistle-blowing purpose for a bunch of wanna spy amateurs to be running around the globe with all of this stuff, bringing it to our greatest global rivals.

The Washington Post series about the Black Budget is the first sign of how these guys, and unfortunately our media establishment, are already not distinguishing between what is “whistle blowing” of some alleged transgression against the American people, and what is simply a juicy bit of news. The spy budget is the latter. It is not whistle blowing.

The media need to stop being defensive and circling the wagon around Greenwald and Miranda and actually start examining what is happening here.

But it still doesn’t mean Miranda was engaging in terrorism, or trying to help terrorists.

Accept all this as true and what you are left with is gross (criminal??) incompetence on the part of the people gathering and holding this data. If they can’t keep this out of the hands of someone like Miranda, they have no business putting it on computer systems that can be compromised as easily as these were.

And a certain myopia on the part of the officials desperate to avoid blame: Announcing that Greenwald and his colleagues have this data may be all the encouragement someone needs who might want to break into their homes/offices and steal this stuff.

Even if true it isn’t relevant to what made the case scandalous, namely the use of anti-terrorist legislation to hold Miranda. Had they held him for, say, breaches of the Official Secrets Act, that might have been legitimate, but in this case anti-terrorist laws were being used for what was not a terrorist case. This feeds into a much wider concern about abuse of those laws.

“The media need to stop being defensive and circling the wagon around Greenwald and Miranda and actually start examining what is happening here.”

Well said sir!

Unfortunately, the old Pravda and Izvestia are out of the business of being Andropov’s puppet mouthpieces and the news business isn’t doing so well, either, domestically. Now to report the truth, you have to be outside the country, or risk being secretly indicted as a co-conspirator, for telling the truth in a …democracy?

Assuming this is true…So what? What if instead of being good Americans, Brits, etc, these spies are, in fact, pretty awful people who murder, torture, harass, and otherwise create mayhem around the world on behalf of less than honorable causes?

We assume that they are defending us from other bad people, but their track record is actually pretty horrible. Maybe it’s time to smack down all the shenanigans. Don’t let your kids join the CIA, the military, or any of those contractors spying on everyone. Bring home the troops, the drones, the spies, and all the craziness might just stop. It’s worth a try.

The funny thing is that the UK government seems to be saying that the American NSA knows the identities and whereabouts of UK agents. If that’s true, then unless the UK provided that information to the NSA under some sort of non-disclosure agreement, it seems like the information already lost its character as a “secret” because the NSA could do whatever it wanted to with the information.

This doesn’t change my opinion of the situation. Anyone who blows national security secrets, or helps in that, is never anything but a lawbreaker, and possibly a de-facto helper of terrorists. I never had any sympathy for this guy, Snowden, or other recent criminals.

That’s the statute he was detained under. (A helpful list of what constitutes terrorism under UK law) And aside from provoking a little richly deserved terror of exposure in the spymasters who are combing through all of your and my and everyone else’s communications, there’s still absolutely nothing whatsoever that justifies his detention.

This particularly galls:

It is “impossible” for Glenn Greenwald or any other journalist to determine which info could damage UK national security: Robbins statement

This basically says that journalists have zero business in whistleblowing and exposing any government secrets. In other words, the government should have an unrestricted right to withhold any and all information it wants to keep from its citizens.

This is totally and completely corrupt. It is a perversion of laws meant to prevent terrorist acts (thus proving the danger of such legislation) and corruption of basic principles of democracy, the absolute need for an informed citizenry.

To those emphasizing that an anti-terrorism law was used: it was used because among the thousands of stolen national security documents that Miranda was transporting across international boundaries, are some that the UK government could can aid terrorists. They have a law on the books that makes possession of such material illegal. Regardless of what one might think of such a law, it is the law.

In light of the facts seeping out, I find it rather breathtaking that Miranda/Greenwald would actually go so far as to sue the UK government. They are going to lose.

As to Greenwald’s credibility, remember that when Miranda was first detained, he made it sound like his partner was just detained out of vindictiveness whilst on vacation or something. No he was transporting thousands of highly sensitive UK documents which were illegally detained, through the UK itself. What did they expect to happen?

Snowden/Greenwald and their associates seem incredibly out of the their depth, which is very scary considering the sheer volume of material they are shuttling around the world to places like China and Russia.

A troubling legal aspect, as to the rule of law, is that whenever a government is caught abusing or stretching a statute, in order to circumvent the law’s intentions, then it simply gets a judgment to retroactively legalize its own behavior.

They may all be behaving badly but some are behaving more badly than others. The privacy of the people is protected by the Constitution in this country anyway, and by a couple of hundred years of hallowed tradition, longer in England. The privacy of the government is protected by what? Self assertion. When the Government can show cause to infringe upon the privacy of the people, they have proscribed legal ways to do it which the people have every reason to expect will be honored. When the people suspect that the government is abusing its privacy, what the heck are they supposed to do – take a couple of years off from work?

Snowden downloaded 20,000 files – there is no way he knows what is on those files nor does Greenwald. That the names of intelligence agents might be included in the 20,000 files is not exactly a shocker.

I appreciate that Snowden has instigated a much needed debate about the surveillance state and I am happy to see the reforms that are being put in place although I think it is not enough. But Snowden is no hero – he did not need to grab 20,000 files on his way out the door. States have intelligence services and there is a level at which this is necessary and prudent.

I share the mistrust about government – but it is naïve to think the “other” side is any less prone to lies, secrecy and dumbassedness.

This makes one nostalgiac for the days when Lenin published all the secret communications and agreements between the Allied Powers (and between various Allied Powers and various Central Powers), at least all the ones the Czar’s government was privy to. But then, one becomes melancholy that the world didn’t change appreciably as a result.

Greenwald and other journalists may not know what documents, if published, would actually damage the security of the U.K., or its agents, or that of the U.S. or any other country. But if they restrict themselves to publishing the facts of lawbreaking and other wrongdoing by government officials and members of the intelligence services, they should be immune from prosecution and remain above reproach. Any damage done is the responsibility of the lawbreakers whose wrongdoing required exposure.

Contra the title, I find this “news” to be the opposite of “startling”. More than half of it has been repeatedly said before, and one Rod Dreher recently opined that it was all a bunch of constant lies.

Which brings me to these questions: Why does Rod Dreher now credulously believe the exact same suspects playing the exact same song? Why are we back to suddenly stenographing the latest Police State Pravda Press Release again? Why, exactly, is anyone “startled” by these allegations and now fully convinced that this latest PR salvo isn’t an equally bogus and distorted pack of lies?

“Greenwald and other journalists may not know what documents, if published, would actually damage the security of the U.K., or its agents, or that of the U.S. or any other country.”

Then maybe they should consult (1) a reporter experienced in national security/intelligence affairs or (2) someone previously involved in the ‘national security community’.

Classified documents are all clearly labeled as such, on every page, with labels that mean something. Letting them be published willy nilly can cause real damage. For example, there have been reports about the ‘real time’ intel that was available to the decisions makers during the Bin Laden raid. That goes to ‘sources and methods’; revealing those, or even suggesting the capabilities, truly does damage national security.

It’s interesting to see how many minds are already made up on this issue. There’s something about Greenwald that I just don’t trust.

First, Greenwald seems more like an activist than a journalist. He seems to be too interested in injecting himself into the story and to trying to situate himself to dictate the course that the US takes concerning Snowden. That strikes me as unethical. Bob Woodward reported on Watergate, but he and Bernstein stayed in the background. They broke the story; they didn’t try to make themselves the story. Greenwald should do the same.

Second, Greenwald’s alleged relationship with Miranda is suspicious. Why would a 20-something Brazilian hunk have any interest in a frumpy, middle-aged guy like Greenwald. Heck, Greenwald is old enough to have children older than Miranda. Further, why should Miranda, if he’s merely Greenwald’s spouse, be injecting himself into Greenwald’s reporting? Unless Miranda has an agreement in place with the Guardian, there’s no apparent reason why he would involve himself in the Snowden charade. If Greenwald were a chemist, would Miranda go to the lab on weekends and wash the glassware for the following week’s experiments?

Why does Rod Dreher now credulously believe the exact same suspects playing the exact same song?

I suspect that Rod wants to get people discussing the issue, and he’s an intelligent and experienced blogger. So he understands human nature well enough to present the topic in a way that generates interest and seeds the initial direction.

If it was my blog it would be a snoozefest because I would probably have way too dry and informational presentation style.

W Dalton: “But if they restrict themselves to publishing the facts of lawbreaking and other wrongdoing by government officials and members of the intelligence services, they should be immune from prosecution and remain above reproach.”

They already have already blown that one. The Black Budget published by the Washington Post wasn’t evidence of lawbreaking or wrongdoing. In exchange for giving the domestic audience a few minutes of raised eyebrows, they’ve given our enemies enough materials to pour over for the next year, alerting them to programs they didn’t previously know about. So Snowden is no longer “above reproach” if he ever was.